Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

SELECTIONS FOR READING

369

History. Fisher, The Colonial Era; Thwaite, The Colonies; Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbors, Beginnings of New England, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America.

Winsor, Handbook of the Revolution; Sloane, French War and the Revolution; Fisher, Struggle for American Independence; Fiske, A Critical Period of American History; Hart, Formation of the Union. Studies of social life in Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days; Fisher, Men, Women and Manners of Colonial Times; Crawford, Romantic Days in the Early Republic.

Literature. Tyler, History of American Literature, 1607-1765, and Literary History of the Revolution; Sears, American Literature of the Colonial and National Periods; Marble, Heralds of American Literature (a few Revolutionary authors); Patterson, Spirit of the American Revolution as Revealed in the Poetry of the Period; Loshe, The Early American Novel (includes a study of Charles Brockden Brown).

Life of Franklin, by Bigelow, 3 vols., by Parton, 2 vols., by McMaster, by Morse, etc. Lives of other Colonial and Revolutionary worthies in American Statesmen, Makers of America, Cyclopedia of American Biography, etc. (see "Biography" in General Bibliography).

Fiction. A few historical novels dealing with Colonial times are: Cooper, Satanstoe, The Red Rover; Kennedy, Rob of the Bowl; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Motley, Merry Mount; Cooke, The Virginia Comedians; Carruthers, Cavaliers of Virginia; Austin, Standish of Standish; Barr, The Black Shilling; Mary Johnston, To Have and to Hold.

Novels with a Revolutionary setting are: Cooper, The Spy, The Pilot; Simms, The Partisan, Katherine Walton; Kennedy, Horseshoe Robinson; Winthrop, Edwin Brothertoft; Eggleston, A Carolina Cavalier; Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes; Mitchell, Hugh Wynne; Churchill, Richard Carvel; Gertrude Atherton, The Conqueror.

CHAPTER II

LITERATURE OF THE NEW NATION (1800-1840)

Behind him lay the gray Azores,

Behind, the gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.

The good mate said, "Now must we pray,

For lo! the very stars are gone:

Brave Admiral, speak; what shall I

say?

"Why say, 'Sail on! sail on! and on!'"

Joaquin Miller, "Columbus "

Historical Background. It was in the early part of the nineteenth century that America began to be counted among the great nations of the world, and it was precisely at that time that she produced her first national literature, a literature so broadly human that it appealed not only to the whole country but to readers beyond the sea. Irving, Cooper and Bryant are commonly regarded as the first notable New World writers; and we may better understand them and their enthusiastic young contemporaries if we remember that they grew up with the country"; that they reflected life at a time when America, having won her independence and emerged from a long period of doubt and struggle, was taking her first confident steps in the sun and becoming splendidly conscious of her destiny as a leader among the world's free people.

Indeed, there was good reason for confidence in those early days; for never had a young nation looked forth upon a more National heartening prospect. The primitive hamlets of ColoEnthusiasm nial days had been replaced by a multitude of substantial towns, the somber wilderness by a prosperous farming country. The power of a thousand rivers was turning the

EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD

371

wheels of as many mills or factories, and to the natural wealth of America was added the increase of a mighty commerce with other nations. By the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Florida her territory was vastly increased, and still her sturdy pioneers were pressing eagerly into more spacious lands beyond the Mississippi. Best of all, this enlarging nation, once a number of scattered colonies holding each to its own course, was now the Union; her people were as one in their patriotism, their loyalty, their intense conviction that the brave New World experiment in free government, once scoffed at as an idle dream, was destined to a glorious future. American democracy was not merely a success; it was an amazing triumph. Moreover, this democracy, supposed to be the weakest form of government, had already proved its power; it had sent its navy abroad to humble the insolent Barbary States, and had measured the temper of its soul and the strength of its arm in the second war with Great Britain.

In fine, the New World had brought forth a hopeful young giant of a nation; and its hopefulness was reflected, with more of zeal than of art, in the prose and poetry of its literary men. Just as the enthusiastic Elizabethan spirit reflected itself in lyric or drama after the defeat of the Armada, so the American spirit seemed to exult in the romances of Cooper and Simms; in the verse of Pinckney, Halleck, Drake and Percival; in a multitude of national songs, such as "The American Flag," Warren's Address, "Home Sweet Home" and "The StarSpangled Banner." We would not venture to liken one set of writings to the other, for we should be on the weak side of an Elizabethan comparison; we simply note that a great national enthusiasm was largely responsible for the sudden appearance of a new literature in the one land as in the other.

Literary Environment. In the works of four writers, Irving, Cooper, Bryant and Poe, we have the best that the early national period produced; but we shall not appreciate these writers until we see them, like pines in a wood, lifting their

heads over numerous companions, all drawing their nourishment from the same soil and air. The growth of towns and cities in America had led to a rapid increase of newspapers, magazines and annuals (collections of contemporary prose and verse), which called with increasing emphasis for poems, stories, essays, light or "polite" literature. The rapid growth of the nation set men to singing the old psalm of Sursum Corda, and every man and woman who felt the impulse added his story or his verse to the national chorus. When the first attempt at a summary of American literature was made in 1837, the author, Royal Robbins, found more than two thousand living writers demanding his attention.

Knicker

bocker School

It was due, one must think, to geography rather than to any spirit of sectionalism, to difficulty of travel between the larger towns rather than to any difference of aim or motive, that the writers of this period associated themselves in a number of so-called schools or literary centers. New York, which now offered a better field for literary work than Boston or Philadelphia, had its important group of writers called the Knickerbocker School, which included Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake, both poets and cheerful satirists of New World society; the versatile Nathaniel Parker Willis, writer of twenty volumes of poems, essays, stories and sketches of travel; and James Kirke Paulding, also a voluminous writer, who worked with Irving in the Salmagundi essays and whose historical novels, such as The Dutchman's Fireside (1831), are still mildly interesting.1

In the South was another group of young writers, quite as able and enthusiastic as their northern contemporaries. Among these we note especially William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), whose Yemassee, Border Beagles, Katherine Walton and many

1 Irving, Cooper and Bryant are sometimes classed among the Knickerbockers; but the work of these major writers is national rather than local or sectional, and will be studied later in detail.

Southern
Writers

LITERARY SCHOOLS

373

other historical romances of Colonial and Revolutionary days were of more than passing interest. He was a high-minded and most industrious writer, who produced over forty volumes of poems, essays, biographies, histories and tales; but he is now remembered chiefly by his novels, which won him the title of "the Cooper of the South." At least one of his historical romances should be read, partly for its own sake and partly for a comparison with Cooper's work in the same field. Thus The Yemassee (1835), dealing with frontier life and Indian warfare, may be read in connection with Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841), which has the same general theme; or The Partisan (1835), dealing with the bitter struggle of southern Whigs and Tories during the Revolution, may well be compared with Cooper's The Spy (1821), which depicts the same struggle in a northern environment.

[graphic]

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS

Other notable writers of the South during this period were Richard Henry Wilde the poet, now remembered by the song (from an unfinished opera) beginning, "My life is like the summer rose"; William Wirt, the essayist and biographer; and John Pendleton Kennedy, writer of essays and stories which contain many charming pictures of social life in Virginia and Maryland in the days "before the war."

In New England was still another group, who fortunately avoided the name of any school. Sparks, Prescott, Ticknor, Story, Dana, -the very names indicate how true was Boston to her old scholarly traditions. Meanwhile Connecticut had

« AnkstesnisTęsti »